We recently remodeled our kitchen and I have been coveting a cool backsplash. A while back, I took a few pottery classes and really enjoyed working with leaves, so I thought it would be cool to do some tiles with leaves from our garden to use in a back splash (you might be able to spot: sage, rosemary, parsley, Japanese maple, thyme, coleus, watermelon, tomato, cucumber, marigold, creeping jenny, and a few other leaves).

Here are all the tiles together:

Instead of glazing them (which would require another firing that I do not have the patience for), I finished them by rubbing them down with brown shoe polish paste to act sort of like a resist. Then I painted over them with a thin wash of ivory acrylic paint and then washed the paint off of the waxed surface. I will seal them with a coat of satin finish poly before installation.

I recently made this birdhouse for my mother-in-law. I used a warped old pottery tile I made in class several years ago (textured pieces). Smashed it up and added mirror, stained glass, and flat marbles.

I liked this mix of materials so much I had to make another. This one uses textured glass, pieces of an old patterned dinner plate, and a few flat marbles thrown in for good measure. This one still needs to be grouted.

Our local Habitat Restore did a class a while back on painting carpet squares. My friend and I went to the class and we've been hooked on painting "rugs" ever since. The carpet squares are $2 each at the Habitat store and it only takes an hour or two to paint them. SO much FUN!

My favorite so far:

This one still needs something. I'm unhappy with how close the lettering is to the edge of the rug too...

We recently had our electric meter replaced/moved and it left a gnarly hole in the siding. With old aluminum siding, I'm not sure we could find a patch that doesn't look like a complete eye sore, so I made a garden sign to hang over it in the mean time. For the lettering, I used this technique (http://www.craftionary.net/2012/05/hand-painted-kitchen-sign-board-tutorial-guest-post.html), but before I taped down the paper, I rubbed the back with graphite so I could skip the additional outlining step. The wood had knotholes on the left-hand side so I placed the flower centers there. The flowers, vines and banners were drawn on freehand.

Just got this sucker out of the wash. I finished it last night and the baby shower is today at 2:30 - nothing like waiting until the last minute. This was the first time I ever worked with Minky Dot - I love that stuff! It's difficult to tell in the photo, but the thin border is a solid pink while the zigzag is a subtle tone on tone pattern. The baby's room is pale blue with yellow/white chevron curtains and pink accents. I hope she likes it...

Just finished up this painting for a friend. I'm still not sure about the dog on the right, I think she needs a little bit of work on the highlights, but overall, I'm glad it's (nearly) done! Here's the original photo:

so I came across this http://www.shelterness.com/diy-pallet-pet-beds/ and thought it was pretty darn cute. Our oldest dachshund is blind and arthritic and her old bones can't take the cold tile floor even under a cushy dog bed, so I wanted her to have a place where she was raised up and out of way of foot traffic.

Here it is before I got started:

Ok, I did NOT do my research before starting. Apparently there are ways of disassembling these things that make it way easier (drilling out nails, etc.) My method involved a crowbar, a hammer, pliers a lot of cursing and a little prayer - so it's VERY um, rustic? This is the base of the bed:

I wasn't sure how to do the sides, so I thought lathing strips would work to hold them together. I didn't have any of those, so I sawed up 3 yard sticks and used them instead. I used wood glue and finishing nails to hold the side walls together.

Once the side walls were done, I used L brackets to attach the side walls to the back and then drywall screws to attach the resulting piece to the base. There's probably a better way to do this, but I was winging it.

And here it is in "action". It's actually big enough for all three of our dogs!

Our town is having a Mardi Gras parade tomorrow, and some of us are walking shelter dogs in the Canine portion of the parade. So we got together and made some masks. The last one will be worn by a volunteer in a black/white spotted dog costume!

The smallest tags are just text (we used those for the nut jars pictured above)

The sale was a HUGE success! Yesterday was the coldest day we've had this winter, so we were really worried that people wouldn't come out, but we had a steady stream of customers and raised over 600 dollars to help lower adoption fees on hard to place animals! Thanks for looking!